Monthly Archives: June 2014

A New Take on Instagram in Advertising

ikea-instagram

Social media has become more involved with advertising over the past few years. While Facebook and Twitter are among the most popular platforms for advertisers to creatively market on, Instagram seems to get less press.

Ikea has taken a new approach, both original and interactive, to utilizing Instagram when advertising its new catalog in Russia. By using the standard grid interface already established in Instagram, the collection is displayed much like a website. You can select each individual picture to see more of the collection and the pieces within each category.

Take a look at the Instagram collection here: ikea_ps_2014. It surprises me we don’t see more brands creatively tackling Instagram as they do their other social media platforms. Hopefully we will see more brands follow Ikea’s lead and come up with some new innovative ideas.

What Sparks our Fire: Seeing a brand take a creative approach to advertising on Instagram.

What do you think of Ikea’s Instagram catalogue?

Google’s Newest Technology: Cardboard

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This week Google hosted their developers conference, Google I/O where the tech giant announced a variety of updates to their Android operating system. But, seemingly the coolest thing that Google did announce came as a gift to all attendees at the end of the conference – cardboard.

Being that this is Google we are talking about, the Cardboard device is much more than what you would image from a piece a cardboard. Instead it is a full on virtual reality headset, similar to the Oculus Rift, except made of cardboard.

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All users need to do is assemble one of these devices, which is not that difficult, place their phone into it and then they can enter an entirely virtual world. Currently there are only a few apps available in cardboard since it was just launched this week. But, we can only image where this will go as a very simple and easy entry into the world of virtual reality.

This is clearly a sign of things to come though in technology. It is time for us as advertisers to start imaging how we can get our foot in the door of virtual reality and really ride the wave of this new technology.

What Sparks our Fire: How Google is able to take the simplest of materials, and make it an amazing piece of technology.

What uses can you imagine for Google Cardboard?

A Cup of Coffee or a Trip to Paris?

Coffee-Infographic

It seems like a pretty easy decision. But when you break it down, it’s actually a bit more challenging. Who wouldn’t pick a trip to Paris in a heartbeat? When you look at what you would have to pass up for that, it makes the decision a little more difficult.

The above infographic from ValuePenguin demonstrates how much money can be saved by brewing coffee at home instead of purchasing a cup everyday on the way to work. It is pretty amazing when you look at the numbers laid out to see how much more a cup of coffee from Starbucks can be compared to using a Keurig or a drip coffee machine. But, as I look at my large iced coffee I picked before coming into the office, I still doubt I will be able to completely drop this luxury from my life. Even if that means 20 years from now that money could go towards tickets to the Super Bowl.

What Sparks our Fire: A look at how much we are truly spending on our coffee addiction.

Will you switch to brewing your coffee at home?

Even Bingier Binge Watching

BreakingBad

It’s summer. And you’re probably like us, busy spending as much time as possible enjoying the beautiful weather outside. This leaves much less time to keep up with all of your favorite TV shows.

Skimo is here to help you with this predicament. What if I told you instead of giving up 12 hours of your summer to watch a season of Breaking Bad, you could watch it all in 20 minutes. Skimo shortens TV shows, YouTube videos, TED Talks and whatever else meets your binge watching needs. It uses a unique video algorithm that pulls out the most important and entertaining parts for your quick viewing pleasure. Each scene is around 30 seconds and they cut quickly between each. Full episodes are now about 2-3 minutes long.

Take a look at this sample Skimo of an episode of Fraiser:

What Sparks our Fire: The ability to stay caught up with the most popular TV shows, without having to pass up the opportunity to enjoy the great summer weather.

Which shows will you Skimo?